The Woman Taking Coffee
1774
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
About the artist
Artist
Louis-Marin Bonnet
Louis-Marin Bonnet (1736–1793) was a French artist, born in Paris.
See the richer artist page1774
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
The Woman Taking Coffee is a 1774 by Louis-Marin Bonnet, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A woman in a pink dress sits at a small table, lifting a cup of coffee to her lips. The room is soft and quiet, with light falling gently on her face and the silver tray. Bonnet didn’t paint this—he printed it. He used layers of colored ink to make it look like a pastel drawing, a trick that fooled many collectors. He even added gold leaf to the frame, pretending the prints came from England to avoid French laws. Look up the technique called *sfumato* to see how artists blurred edges for a dreamy effect.
This print belongs to a series created by Louis-Marin Bonnet featuring innovative color printing techniques derived from optical science to mimic the pastel drawings and miniature paintings highly sought by collectors. To increase the works’ appeal, the artist also developed a method for printing decorative frames by applying gold leaf. Hoping to evade strict governmental regulations on the uses of gold in France, he passed off his prints as English imports, which he sold at his store Au Magasin Anglois (At the English Shop). Bonnet’s elaborate ruse included English titles, the address of a…
The elaborate gold frame surrounding this print was created with some of the same techniques used to gild frames in the 1700s.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Louis-Marin Bonnet (1736–1793) was a French artist, born in Paris.
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